I was working on connecting my C++ application to a database server. I decided to use the opensource MySql database. So I installed the MySql server on my Laptop which runs on Linux.

Next, I wanted to download the connector, so I went to the MySql page and located it. When I clicked on Download button, unfortunately what I saw was a oracle’s registration page. I had to login to my oracle account so that I could download it! I was expecting a signup using either my Facebook or Google account, but No, these douche-bags wanted me to fill up all the details separately for them.

So I thought, Ill do it, since its just a one time job. I started filling out the details. I looked around the text field’s to see if there are any particular type of characters that I need to enter. I found none!

I quickly filled out all the details (enough for them to start spamming). Then I entered the ridiculously long text in the captcha to prove that I’m not a some goddamned program trying to busy their servers. Then I hit the submit button. To my surprise, the there was a red rectangle surrounding the two password fields. It said that the password should have,

a. At least one number

b. At least one upper case character

c. At least one lower case character.

Firstly, why should I do that? What is the worst thing that might happen if someone gets to know my oracle account password? May be download another copy of MySql server? I don’t have my bank account details there! Why should I have a awkward sounding password to protect something that’s not important to me?

Secondly, WTF was the form doing when I was entering the details? Even Microsoft does instant validations these days.

I was wondering why they are taking over all open source projects. If someone knows the reason, please drop it in the comments.

I had a similar ‘piss-of’ moment the other day. I couldn’t believe that had embedded a ask toolbar along with the Java SDK!

It has been an amazing journey of 13 months in this industry, 3 in Veriton and 10 in ThoughtFocus. I had the chance to play many roles, from a Mobile application developer to Unit test engineer. I have always felt great in being involved in multiple projects and using various different technologies. I’m very glad that I have met and even gone beyond some of the goals I had set when I started. It has been a fulfilling experience to me.

These are a few new Goals i have set for this year

Learn all the ‘Ends’:

I have never really liked the Idea of being either only a ‘UI developer’ or ‘Back End developer’ or ‘DB Guy’ or ‘Unit tester’. Imagine a web application having only a DB or only static HTML pages. Or worse, Just a large heap of Java classes! I want to have all the skills required to build an entire application.

Improve the quality of coding:

I was more of a hit-and-run programmer when I joined, whenever there was a new requirement, I just used to carve a new function, put all the functionality into that and push it to QA. Eventually, the code base started becoming very large and unmanagable. I started having maintenance nightmares.

Which is why, I learnt the lesson before it was too late. Now I iterate through a million different ways to find out the best way of implementing a functionality.

Learn to write good designs

Though an average IT professional learns this during the teen-age of his career , I want to do this ASAP, despite still being in my programming diapers. Design sounds interesting , since it requires a lot of thinking and I like thinking.

Read a lot of books and blogs

I have started reading about the pioneers in the field of computing, and it is quite inspiring to read about their achievements. It helps in two ways,

1. Its fascinating to know how Computer Science evolved

2. It helps in keeping personal benchmarks high.

My life has changed in a lot of ways after joining IT industry. I can make better decisions, priorities are more clear to me, more confidence in solving real life problems, smarter thinking etc etc.

Though a lot of people attribute IT to a stressful boring and frustrating life style, its not really so. Its very challenging, but at the same time, its equally fascinating. You get to do certain things that people in other profession don’t. Every new project that we take up is an entirely new experience. Environment changes rapidly, demanding you to adapt to the changes very fast!

There is always a flip side to every job, we do feel disappointed at times, in fact a lot of times. But its not because of work, but rather because of shallow managers, dirty politics, lack of vision in top management. It shatters you into pieces when you realize that your company adapts a certain level of deception in order to make more money. Yes, it happens. A lot of small companies do it(Luckily, my company doesn’t). Sad part is that such companies will remain small forever, being contented with just the extra chunk of money they have made. Well, we don’t really have to bother much, because such companies don’t matter at all. It wouldn’t matter at all if those companies seizes to exist. There will be millions of other companies which are exactly the same.

( in case you havent read the first part of this review, check it out here )
I completed reading the entire novel. I hoped that my opinion would change. But it dint. It was quite disappointing.

Let me sum it up. An Indian guy leaves to USA for higher studies, falls in love with an American girl, who is in love with some other guy. The combined effort of destiny and our hero splits them apart, and gives him a chance to make a move towards her. She accepts him and everything goes on smooth for a while, but only till the girl’s ex-boyfriend shows up. Our hero looks and him and gets shattered seeing him shrink due to his failed love. Feels bad and guilty, surrenders his girl back to him, restores her love for him and vanishes from there. He completed his studies and comes back to India, feeling more manly!

Shit happens, yes, it really does. Because the novel is shit, and it happened. I was at reliance timeout last night, and i did feel that my Karma’s got the entire universe to conspire against me, and ta-da, i picked up the worst novel from their collection.

To further prove the karma theory, let me tell you, i even started reading the novel! I’m half way through. The story is about a young Indian lad, supposedly of Einstein match in IQ, but shy to death when he confronts girls. This man, moves into america, because he wanted to prove himself good against an as-dumb-like-a-donkey cricket player, because he was beaten up by that cup-cake during recess time while in school.

Now he is already in the USA, he meets some random girl on his first day in America, she offers to guide him in newyork, later eats pizza with him, then get drunk and sleeps with him. The next day, he gets up and realizes that she is in love with another guy!

what the hell? After reading this, i feel there should be an IEEE standard for novels!

But wait, there’s more in the basket. Ill finish reading the entire thing and get back to you guys.

I started my day to the sound of ripping of papers. It kind of amazed me, since im not used to hearing such sound under normal circumstances. So the lethargic me, got up almost instantly and walked down the stairs out of my room to see what the hell is up! It was my mother tearing off some of the ‘old but irrelevant’ photographs, which were floating around in the closet, with out even a single album to hold them together. She had emptied the entire closet to the floor, and I got there to what stuffs were inside it. We usually never opened that closet, firstly because it contained nothing useful in it; secondly because, it was so full that, we feared if we opened it, things would pop out and we may need hours to put all the stuff back into the closet.

Today after so many years, the contents of the closet got some air to breathe. My mom considered cleaning it, since she, the cleanliness freak, had nothing left to clean. I saw some of my childhood photographs, which placed me on a time machine and drove me back to childhood. So there are a certain things, that I now think, were the most important part of my childhood.

Mogli. I watched every time without missing it. My mom tells me that I even cried for buying a mogli t-shirt, which I finally got for one of my bdays.

Danasur. Im not very sure about the name, I think it sounds something like that. It’s a story about dinosaurs that was friendly and cute. I really thought dinosaur was a friendly pet animal. It was later when my parents to me to birla museum in Hyderabad that my view was broken.

Prabhu Deva. I was a fan of that guy. I was especially fond of the urvashi urvashi dance. Because of that song, my mom had to buy me some sort of soft pant, similar to the one that prabhu deva wears in that song. I used to wear it and dance on the bed, assuming that it is a bus.

Cricket. Though in childhood I never understood what the game was all about, I liked the idea of holding a bat and swinging it I air. I had a plastic cricket kit, which I was proud of.

Tape Recorder. It was brought new to my house, and it was the first one in the locality. My dad also had bought many blank cassettes to record my voice in that. I grew fond of that. I used to sing some English poems, thought in school, into that microphone. I also know what buttons I should press so that my voice gets recorded.

Dad’s vehicle. As soon as my dad got home from work, I used to sit on his vehicle and pretend to be riding it. It was a great feeling. Strange thing is that, I thought pulling the breaks increases the speed.

Festivals. This is because I loved eating. When my grand parents were alive, we used to celebrate each and every festival with pomp. And every festival came with a 3 course meals. I loved eating the special sweets, that too, especially those that I stole from kitchen.

Tamil. Though Konkani (Or some people like to call it brahmani) is my mother tongue, I was surrounded by tamilians. So I had fascination for tamil. Later when we changed our residence for a better one, I gradually lost the touch of tamil, and now I only understand what ‘’sapad accha’’ means 😛

My crazy ambitions. I wanted to be a police constable. I considered it to be the greatest job, next only to the president of the country. During holidays, I used to move around with a cane.

School friends. They are crazy ones. Im still in touch with them. They added to my craziness.

Every one of us will be having crazy childhood memories. They are the things to be laughed at, loved and cherished for ever, for they are the things that keep us young and reminds us that the world is something far greater than computer programming.

[Update 07-feb-2013. I was a noob when I wrote this one. Don’t consider it seriously]

“Java is not object oriented, since it has primitive data types!” , “int, char, float etc etc in java are not objects but primitive data-types. so how can it be object oriented?”

I’m reading the above crap in too often these days. Yeah, it does freak me out! Oh my dear java developers, if you come across any person ranting such nonsense, please check the credentials of the person. If someone says such things despite knowing java quite well, it only implies that the person lacks analytical thinking.

Let me get into the argument in this way: Let us say you are a the education minister of your state. And also an MLA of some constituency. Now how would you introduce yourself to some one? You will say you are an MLA? Or will you say you are the education minister? The answer is obvious.

Similarly, java does contain primitive data-types like int, float, double, boolean. But it should be remembered that it also contains wrapper class for all those data-types, like ‘Integer’ for ‘int’, ‘Float’ for ‘float’,’ Double’ for ‘double’,’ Boolean’ for ‘Boolean’. You can choose to never use the primitive data-types, and use only the wrapper class, it would’nt make much of a difference. But java programmers use the primitives only because its execution is faster. So the primitive data-types exists in java as an option(a good one), hence you can confidently say that java is a pure object oriented language.

The lot of free time I have has now made me blog quite often! I like blogging. It fulfills me as a hobby, But the sad part is that I don’t have a big count in readership. Frankly, I don’t even know how many read my blog. Considering that I’m a lethargic log of wood, and my reluctance to write when there is some new video on hard disk, I can safely draw a rough estimate of number of readers I have. So let me try to count the number of people who know about this blog, and probably also read it.

Manasa. She is my schoolmate and also one of the very first readers of my blog. I wrote to her when I started blogging(while I was in touch with her). She even commented once or twice. But later as I eventually lost touch with her, I stopped getting SMS feedback form her.

Sapna. She too was my schoolmate, and one of the readers when my blog on blogger started getting big. I have lost touch with her too, but I can assume that she still reads my blog(Coz she has a lot of free time).

Abhijeeth. He is my collegemate. We stayed in the same hostel, and accessed internet together at the internet centre before the campus went wifi. He was sitting besides me when I was updating my blog. Since then, I have heard him once or twice talking about my blog.

* N Bhat. (sorry, cant mention her first name) She was my school mate and also a kind of special one to me. Though we were not dating, We were strangely close. I remember hearing from her that she finds my write up attractive.

Priyank Madyastha. He is my roommate and also one of my best friends since three years. I had asked him to read and rate my blog when I had written on terrorism. I hope is still reads my work.

The number seems to be really less, mainly because I never promoted my blog amongst my friends. Only my best friends know about my blog. I want only two types of readers; ones who are my best friends and the others whom I have never met. Yes strange as it sounds, I write primarily write for strangers. And expect them to also clap at times J

So the number of readers are, 5+n. where n stands for the number of people I don’t know, who read my blog.

PS: Please write a comment or push the like button, I really need a count, my dear boys and girls J